Hello,
what is the simplest method to check if there is a new program version available?
I have my application, a server, and also a website. The application is c++.
How to send an http GET command, and how to serve it?
My idea was to simply have a text file on my website that contains a string (e.g. "version1.2.1"), and to retrieve it with GET. How to go about that, without having to add numerous includes and libraries to my application?
Thanks
How to go about that, without having to add numerous includes and libraries to my application?
Opening a socket connection to a server and sending a HTTP 1.0 style request is not too bad. You can send a byte string for the request and read data from the socket. As long as everything works ideally and you get a 200-OK response from the server, you can do it in around 30 lines of code. Like this.
But HTTP is a fairly big protocol. Lots of things can go wrong. The server can ask you to delay with a Continue message, or redirect you temporarily or permanently, or ask you to retry, or have various other responses. Consequently it is usually best to use a library that handles the various conditions that HTTP can present.
You could just stash your installer in a Web server and use a http HEAD request to check the last modified date and see if it's newer than the modification date of your own executable from the win32 VERSIONINFO resource.
This is relatively easy to do with any HTTP library, you could then direct the user to the website if you don't want to spend time writing a downloader...
Microsoft's cross-platform REST toolkit is also pretty darn rad.
What is the name of this?
